Have the anti-fat crusaders of the last 20 years caused today’s “obesity epidemic?” Have groups such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the American Heart Association, with their complaints about fat in everything from movie popcorn to Chinese food, encouraged eating habits that are at the root of the weight problems that they now rail against?
A growing amount of research suggests that this could be the case. A glance at the empirical evidence is beginning to suggest that the case against fat is flawed. For the past 20 years the percentage of fat in the American diet has been continuously decreasing but incidence of heart disease has not declined.
Indeed, Americans simply have been doing what they were told. Since 1980 both the government and advocacy groups have harangued Americans to eat foods low in fat. Groups such as CSPI have moved passed rhetorical persuasion to advocating the use of government coercion. Michael Jacobson and Kelley Brownell, CSPI lead “advocacy-researchers,” said “foods high in…fat…[should] be subject to special taxes and…the costs of healthful foods such as fruits and vegetables [should] be subsidized.”
It is now common to compare the perils of fat consumption to that of tobacco. A 1998 New Republic story argued that deaths from fatty foods “are in the same ball park as the number of tobacco-related deaths,” and that “regulating fat can actually be a less intrusive policy than regulating tobacco.”
Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in this crusade has been that we should be eating foods that are high in carbohydrates. Beginning in the 1980s Americans were bombarded with the message that the ideal breakfast was not bacon and eggs but a bagel (with no cream cheese), a banana, and a glass of orange juice, all loaded with carbohydrates. We were told that pasta, rice, baked potatoes, and breads are all good for us because they have little or no fat. The USDA’s “food pyramid” continues to tell us that we should be eating six to 11 servings of “bread, cereals, rice, and pasta” each day. This is more than twice the number of servings as any other food group. Nearly all of the foods that CSPI suggests avoiding are high in fat while the foods that they strongly recommend are high in carbohydrates.
Recently, the fat police’s political and legal attack has focused on fast food. CSPI’s web site proclaims “obesity rates have doubled in kids and tripled in teens, and the…super-sized burgers and fries [are] at least partly to blame.” As is usual, CSPI provides no sound research to back this claim.
But even if it were true, many scientists now argue that the cause is less likely to be the ground beef or the oil in the fries, CSPI’s usual culprits, and more likely to be the bun and the potatoes. Furthermore, it is generally argued that the referenced increase in obesity and the resulting rise in diabetes among children date to the mid-1980s. This is precisely when the low-fat, high-carbohydrate mentality began to sweep the nation and dramatically affect people’s eating habits. While fat consumption dropped over this period, annual grain consumption increased by almost 60 pounds per person.
According to an extensively researched New York Times report (“What If It’s All Been A Big Fat Lie,” July 7, 2002) the new thinking on these issues makes a 180-degree turn from the dogma promulgated by the fat police. Recent research suggests that people on higher-fat, lower-carbohydrate diets, such as Atkins and the Zone, reduce their weight, lower their cholesterol, and, even more dramatically, lower their triglyceride levels. These are also the kinds of diets typically recommended for diabetics. The Times article points to new research, concluding that “there are plenty of reasons to suggest that the low-fat-is-good-health hypothesis has now effectively failed the test of time…low-fat weight-loss diets have proved in clinical trials and real life to be dismal failures.”
But don’t expect groups such as CSPI or the American Heart Association to alter their hard-nosed anti-fat and, by implication, pro-carbohydrate stance. To do so would be to admit that they have misled the American public, financial donors, and policymakers. They also would have to acknowledge that to some degree they are culpable for the obesity problems in society that they so loudly decry.